The important excerpts herein are quoted often and at greater length elsewhere on this website. (Click here and here).  Here is another arrangement:

Our aim is to prescind from human psychology that, in the first place, we may define the objective situation with which man has to deal, and, in the second place, define the psychological attitude that has to be adopted if man is to deal successfully with economic problems.  Thus something of a Copernican revolution is attempted: instead of taking man as he is or as he may be thought to be and from that deducing what economic phenomena are going to be, we take the exchange process in its greatest generality and attempt to deduce the human adaptations necessary for survival. [CWL 21,42- 43]

Concomitance is, I would claim, the key word in Lonergan’s economic thinking. [Philip McShane, [Fusion 1, page 4 ftnt 10]

The concomitance of outlay and expenditure follows from the interaction of supply and demand.  The concomitance of income with outlay and expenditure is identical with the adjustment of the rate of saving to the requirements of the (particular phases of the pure cycle of the) productive process. [CWL 15, 144]

… without further clarification Schumpeter acknowledged that dynamic analysis called for a new light on equilibrium.  Such new light arises when, over and above (DSGE’s) equilibria of supply and demand with respect to goods and services (classical microeconomics), there are recognized further equilibria (crossovers balancing, concomitance of outlays with income and of income with both outlays and expenditure, and actual technical coefficients conforming to normative coefficients) that have to be maintained if an economy chooses to remain in a stationary state, to embark on a long-term expansion, to distribute its benefits to the vast majority of its members, and so to return to a more affluent stationary state until such further time as further expansion beckons. … Moreover, such macroequilibria are more fundamental than the microequilibria assembled by Walras.  (FMD’s macroequilibria) are the conditions of a properly functioning economy. (CWL 15, 92)

(Part Two of CWL 21, entitled Fragments) belongs almost entirely in what I call the Einsteinian context of Part Three, in contrast to the Newtonian achievement of Part One; … [CWL 21, Index, 325]

Taking into account past and (expected) future values does not constitute the creative key transition to dynamics. … Particular boundary conditions, “past and future values” are relatively insignificant for the analysis.  What is significant is the Leibnitz-Newtonian shift of context. [McShane, 1980, 127]

A distinction has been drawn between description and explanation.  Description deals with things as related to us.  Explanation deals with the same things as related among themselves.  The two are not totally independent, for they deal with the same things and, as we have seen, description supplies, as it were, the tweezers by which we hold things while explanations are being discovered or verified, applied or revised. … [CWL 3, 291/316]

… again, as to the notion of cause, Newton conceived of his forces as efficient causes, and the modern mechanics drops the notion of force; it gets along perfectly well without it.  It thinks in terms of a field theory, the set of relationships between n objects.  The field theory is a set of intelligible relations linking what is implicitly defined by the relations themselves; it is a set of relational forms.  The form of any element is known through its relations to all other elements. … Field theory is a matter of the immanent intelligibility of the object. (CWL 10, 154)

… Special Relativity is primarily a field theory, that is, it is concerned not with efficient, instrumental, material, or final causes of events, but with the intelligibility immanent in data; but Newtonian dynamics seems primarily a theory of efficient causes, of forces, their action, and the reaction evoked by action. … [3, 43/67]

A science emerges when thinking in a given field moves to the level of system. … The system really emerged with Newton.  He laid down a set of basic definitions and axioms, and proceeded to demonstrate and conclude from general principles and laws that had been established empirically by his predecessors.  Mechanics became a science in the full sense at that point where it became an organized system. … there is a point in the history of any science when it comes of age, when it has a determinate systematic structure to which corresponds a determinate field.

… real analysis (is) identifying money with what money buys. … If you want to treat money that doesn’t make a difference, you can have a beautiful liberal monetary theory.  But it doesn’t say the way the thing works. [CWL 21, Editors’ Introduction, xxviii  quoting Lonergan]

(Again,) Our aim is to prescind from human psychology that, in the first place, we may define the objective situation with which man has to deal, and, in the second place, define the psychological attitude that has to be adopted if man is to deal successfully with economic problems.  Thus something of a Copernican revolution is attempted: instead of taking man as he is or as he may be thought to be and from that deducing what economic phenomena are going to be, we take the exchange process in its greatest generality and attempt to deduce the human adaptations necessary for survival. [CWL 21,42- 43]

Lonergan’s achievement was to unify all the scattered theorems of Walrasian textbook macrostatics by setting up a unitary basis for macroeconomic dynamics;  the new basis would be a dynamics; it would be an interrelation of conjugate velocities and accelerations; and it would be at an adequate level of abstraction (first and second derivatives) for a velocitous and accelerative process constituted by interdependent flows of so much or so many over an interval, i.e. flows expressed mathematically as velocities and changes of velocities – d/dt and d²/dt².

… there is a canon of complete explanation.  Everything is to be explained. … … … The canon of complete explanation demands that the scientific world, which expresses the relation of things to one another, be constructed completely.  It is not the world of common sense.  (CWL 10, 144)

A systematic explanation, then, requires a normative theoretical framework.  The basic terms and relations of such a framework would specify the distinctions and correlations that articulate the causes, which are not necessarily visible, of events that are apparent to all.  The framework would thus stand to the ordinary apprehension of the booms and slumps of the trade cycle in much the same way that the explanatory grasp of acceleration as the second derivative of a continuous function of distance and time stands to the ordinary, commonsense grasp of what it is to be going faster.  CWL 15,  lv

In brief, Lonergan is looking for an explanation in which the terms are defined by the relations in which they stand, that is, by a process of implicit definition.  This technique (implicit definition) has been used to great effect by David Hilbert in his Foundations of Geometry .”  [Gibbons, 1987, 313]

Now each phase in an exchange economy will have its exchange equilibrium, but the equilibria of the different phases differ radically from one another. … By this cyclic variation within the exchange equilibria there is effected the ‘curvature of the exchange equations.’ … (CWL 21, 51-52)

The entire (macroeconomic community) slipped past Lonergan’s simple move.  I describe the move as paralleling Newton’s move.  Newton started within an old culture of two flows: …  Newton went from two to one.  Lonergan started with a dominant one-flow economic analysis  –  think in terms of the household-firm diagram  –  and separated it into two flows “to form a more basic concept and develop a more general theory.”   [McShane 2017, viii]; also see [CWL 21, 11]

No less than scientific language, symbolic language intends a truth yet can be wrong.  … … things have only one way of being, but humans do not have only one way of knowing.  One who knows scientifically knows universally; but this universality does not belong to things (as if [Plato’s] universals subsisted) but to the scientific way of knowing.  One who apprehends and speaks symbolically is using a way of knowing that is full of vivid imagery and feeling, but nevertheless by reflecting one can distinguish between what are to be attributed to the things themselves and what are to be ascribed to this way of knowing. (CWL 11, 381)

 Lonergan is alone in using this difference in economic activities to specify the significant variables in his dynamic analysis… no one else considers the functional distinctions between different kinds of productive rhythms prior to, and more fundamental than, wealth, value, supply and demand, price levels and patterns, capital and labor, interest and profits, wages, and so forth….only Lonergan analyzes booms and slumps in terms of how their (explanatory) velocities, accelerations, and decelerations are or are not equilibrated in relation to the events, movements, and changes in two distinct monetary circuits of production and exchange as considered both in themselves (with circulatory, sequential dependence) and in relation to each other by means of crossover payments (crossover interdependence). [CWL 15, Editors’ Introduction, lxii]

From the premises and conclusions of this analysis it will the be argued 9) that prices can not be regarded (by the stewards of the economy) as ultimate norms guiding strategic economic decisions, [CWL 15, 5-6]

The question of prices, though first in the IS-LM and AD-AS models, is last in Lonergan’s analysis.  Price changes must be interpreted in the light of the significant explanatory relations among interdependent, implicitly-defined, concomitant functional flows.

 Money is an instrument invented to fulfill a definite task; it is not the ultimate master of the situation.  One has to place first human society which is served by the economic process, and second the economic process which is to be served by money.  Accordingly money has to conform to the objective exigencies of the economic process, and not vice versa. (CWL 21, 101)

… the dummy (money) must be constant in exchange value, so that equal quantities continue to exchange, in the general case, for equal quantities of goods and services.  The alternative to constant value in the dummy is the alternative of inflation and deflation.  Of these famous twins, inflation swindles those with cash to enrich those with property or debts, while deflation swindles those with property or debts to enrich those with cash; in addition to the swindle each of these twins has his own way of torturing the dynamic flows; deflation gives producers a steady stream of losses; inflation yields a steady stream of gains to give production a drug-like stimulus. [CWL 21, 37-38]

It is now necessary to state the necessary and sufficient condition of constancy or variation in the exchange value of the dummy.  To this end we compare two flows of the circulation: the real flow of property, goods, and services, and the dummy flow being given and taken in exchange for the real flow….Accordingly, the necessary and sufficient condition of constant value in the dummy lies in its concomitant variation with the real flow. (CWL 21, 38-39)

The analysis is functional – it is “valid”

I have insisted on focusing on the central issue: the need of a functional analysis of the productive process and its correlated monetary flow. [McShane 1980, 200]

The division is not a matter of social relations or of property or of the properties of things: it is a functional analysis. … The aim of the analysis is to reveal the possibilities of the productive process as a dynamic system. [McShane 1980, 119-20]

you begin to glimpse the necessity and the plausibility of the functional analysis for the understanding and guiding of the globe’s economy. [McShane, 2017, 81]

“Lonergan’s analysis is concrete but heuristic.  It focuses on functional relations intrinsic to the productive process to reach eventually a general theory of dynamic equilibria and disequilibria.” [McShane 1980, 117]

… the materialist is condemned by his own principles to be no more that a manipulator. …  He will maintain with Marx that cultural attitudes are the byproduct  of material conditions, and so he will bestow upon those subjected to communist power the salutary conditions of a closed frontier, clear and firm indoctrination, controlled media of information, a vigilant secret police, and the terrifying threat of labor camps. [CWL 15, 104]

More positively, the channels account for booms and slumps, for inflation and deflation, for changed rates of profit, … . [CWL 15, 17]

All the concepts tumble out together, because all are needed to express adequately a single insight.  All are coherent, for coherence basically means that all hang together from a single insight.  [CWL 3, 12/36] (click here)

the central condition of equilibrium between monetary circuits:

G = c”O” – i’O’ = 0 (CWL 15, 49-51)

 …, the normal entry and exit of quantities of money to the circuits or from them is by the transfers from the redistributive to the supply functions through (S’ – s’O’) and (S” – s”O”).  [CWL 15, 64]

… one may begin at any function to move in either direction.  One may begin anywhere because the total movement is circular.  One may move in either direction, for one may ask where the money goes or where it is coming from. … [CWL 15, 165]

… , the general theory of circuit acceleration is that it takes place in a constrained and limited way when quantities of money in the circuits are constant, but without let or hindrance (but not necessarily a runaway) when quantities of money are variable. Finally, provided (D’-s’I’), (D”-s”I”), G vary only slightly from zero, so that their action is absorbed by stocks of goods at the final markets, they exercise a stimulating effect in favor of positive or negative circuit acceleration; otherwise their action pertains either to superimposed circuits of favorable balances of foreign trade and deficit government spending, or else to the cyclic phenomena of booms and slumps.  (CWL 15, 64-65)

Now every unit of enterprise involves a turnover magnitude and a turnover frequency.  The statement … is not a truism, for it involves a correlation between the quantities and velocities of rates of payment and the quantities and velocities of goods and services. (CWL 15, 57)

The existence of this correlation may be seen readily enough. … There are, then, alternatives between quantity and velocity in both rates of payment and rates of production.  But the quantity alternative in the rates of payment is conjoined with the quantity alternative in the rate of production, and the frequency alternative in the rate of payment is conjoined with the frequency alternative in the rate of production.  The two cases of quantity-velocity are not only parallel but also correlated. [CWL 15, 57]

The purpose of this section is to inquire into the manner in which the rate of saving W is adjusted to the phases of the pure cycle of the productive process.  Traditional theory looked to (manipulating) interest rates to provide suitable adjustment.  In the main we shall be concerned with factors that are prior to changing interest rates and more effective. ¶The simplest manner of attaining a fairly adequate concept of basic income is to divide the economic community into an extremely large number of groups of practically equal income. … In any group i let there be at any given time n_i members; let each member receive an aggregate (basic and surplus) income y_i per interval, so that the whole group receives n_iy_i; finally, let us say that the group directs the fraction w_i of its total income to the basic demand function, so that basic income per interval is given by the equation

I’ = Σw_in_iy_i

… and so one obtains for the increment per interval of basic income the simpler equation

δI’ = Σ (w_iδn_i + n_iδw_i + δn_iδw_i)y_i   ^{Ftnt 189}

ere n_i includes the adjustment due to migration.  We shall consider in turn variations in basic income in virtue of  δn_i  and variations in virtue of  δw_{i .} … Hence, in migrations from low to less-low income groups, most of the increment of individual total income becomes an increment of basic income; but in migrations from high to still higher income groups, most of the increment of individual total income becomes an increment of surplus income.  Evidently, then, suitable migrations are a means of providing adjustments in the community’s rate of saving.  To increase the rate of saving, increase the income of the rich; while they may be too distant from the current operations of the economic process to judge, at least they can put their money into the bank or bonds or stocks, and perhaps others there will see how it can best be used.  To decrease the rate of saving, increase the income of the poor. … The foregoing is the fundamental mode of adjusting the rate of saving to the phases of the productive cycle. …(and) this fundamental mode of adjustment is complemented by a further mechanism of automatic correction.  (i.e. price changes) (CWL 15, 133-134)

On the other hand, the egalitarian shift in the distribution of income is, in the main, a merely theoretical possibility. (CWL 15, 137)

(In the basic expansion) … There is the same automatic mechanism as before.  Prices fall.  This has the double effect of increasing the purchasing power of income and bringing about an egalitarian shift in the distribution of monetary income. The increase in purchasing power is obvious.  On the other hand, the egalitarian shift in the distribution of income is, in the main, a merely theoretical possibility.  The fall of prices, unless quantities increase proportionately and with equal rapidity, brings about a great reduction in total rates of payment.  Receipts fall, outlay falls, income falls.  The incidence of the fall of income, in the first instance, upon the entrepreneurial class, and so in the main it is a reduction of surplus income.  Thus we have the same scissors action as before: purchasing power of income increases, and the proportion of basic to surplus income increases; the rate of saving is adjusted to the rates of production as soon as the price level falls sufficiently.  But just as there is an upward price spiral to blunt the edge of the mechanism when the rate of saving is increasing, so there is a downward spiral to have the same effect when the rate of saving should be decreasing.  Falling prices tend to be regarded as a signal that expansion has proceeded too far, that contraction must be the order of the day.  Output is reduced; the income of the lower brackets is reduced; the adjustment of the rate of saving fails to take place; prices fall further; the same misinterpretation arises, and prices fall again.  Eventually, however, the downward spiral achieves the desired effect; surplus income is reduced to the required proportion of total income; and the prices cease to fall. [CWL 15, 138-39]

The foregoing mechanism (of rising prices) provides an automatic adjustment to(wards) an increasing rate of savings.  However, its operation is conditoned.  Unless the quantity of money in circulation expands as rapidly as prices rise and, as well, as rapidly as the productive expansion of quantities requires, there will result a contraction of the process. … … (and) unless the increment in total monetary income goes to higher income brackets and so to surplus income, there will be no adjustment to the rate of saving. … These two types of failure of the automatic mechanism are interrelated.  (CWL 15, 137)

The traditional doctrine of thrift and enterprise looked to the supply of and demand for money to adjust interest rates and the adjusted rates to adjust the rate of saving to the requirements of the productive process.  But it can be argued that a) this view was not sufficiently nuanced in its estimate of the requirements of the productive process, b) that it missed the magnitude of the problem, and c) that it tended to lump together quite different requirements. … [CWL 15, 140, ftnt. 197]

There is a sense in which one may speak of the fraction of basic outlay that moves to basic income as the “costs” of basic production.  It is true that that sense is not at all an accountant’s sense of costs; … (CWL 15 156-57)

An ‘accountant’s unity’ … is a category used in (conventional) accounting.  For Lonergan, (conventional) accounting generally denotes an enterprise within common sense which uses descriptive, as contrasted with explanatory terms (on these terms see Insight 37-38/61-62, 178-79/201-3, 247-48/272-73).  Insofar as that is true, the accountant’s unity is not an adequate index for the normative, explanatory analysis of the productive process. [CWL 15, 26, ftnt 26]

an inner logic or ground in the nature of things indicates the normative or pure cycle of the quantity process. [CWL 21, 134]

1. Leon Walras developed the conception of the markets as exchange equilibria. Concentrate all markets into a single hall. … The conception is exact, but it is not complete. … (CWL 21, 51-52)

In Lonergan’s circulation analysis, the basic terms are rates – rates of productive activities and rates of payments.  The objective of the analysis is to discover the underlying intelligible and dynamic (accelerative) network of functional, mutually conditioning, and interdependent relationships of these rates to one another.  [CWL 15  26-27  ftnt 27]

 Lonergan agreed with Schumpeter that the economist had to know what are the significant variables in the light of which price changes are to be interpreted.  According to Lonergan, standard economic theory had successfully achieved none of these desiderata. [CWL 15, Editors’ Introduction liii]

The question of prices, though first in the IS-LM and AD-AS models, is last in Lonergan’s analysis.  Price changes must be interpreted in the light of the significant explanatory relations among interdependent, implicitly-defined, concomitant functional flows.

… it is necessary to distinguish in concrete relations between two components, namely, a primary relativity and other secondary determinations.  [CWL 3, 491]

(Again, )Taking into account past and (expected) future values does not constitute the creative key transition to dynamics. … Particular boundary conditions, “past and future values” are relatively insignificant for the analysis.  What is significant is the Leibnitz-Newtonian shift of context. [McShane, 1980, 127]

Banks are not there to “force their money upon people,”⁴ nor “do they congratulate themselves if they are loaned up.”⁵  A banking committee is not “an automaton” but understanding and attentive to purpose and situation, “ judging chances of success of each purpose and, as means to this end, the kind of man the borrower is, watching him as he proceeds …”⁶  “It should be observed how important it is for the system of which we are trying to construct a model, that the banker should know, and be able to judge, what his credit is for and that he should be an independent agent.  To realize this is to understand what banking means.”⁷  “the banker’s function is essentially a critical, checking, Banks are not there to “force their money upon people,”⁴ nor “do they congratulate themselves if they are loaned up.”⁵  A banking committee is not “an automaton” but understanding and attentive to purpose and situation, “ judging chances of success of each purpose and, as means to this end, the kind of man the borrower is, watching him as he proceeds …”⁶  “It should be observed how important it is for the system of which we are trying to construct a model, that the banker should know, and be able to judge, what his credit is for and that he should be an independent agent.  To realize this is to understand what banking means.”⁷  “the banker’s function is essentially a critical, checking, admonitory one.  Alike in this respect to economists, bankers are worth their salt only if they make themselves thoroughly unpopular with governments, politicians and the public.  This does not matter in times of intact capitalism.  In the times of decadent capitalism, this piece of machinery is likely to be put out of gear by legislation.”⁸  McShane, Philip (quoting Joseph Schumpeter’s Business Cycles I and II) Implementing Lonergan’s Economics, in The Lonergan Review, Culture Science and Economics, Vol. III, No 1, Spring 2011, Seton Hall University, pp. 196-204

Lonergan’s treatment of the normative equilibrated process and the possible divergences and disequilibria are in Section 15, “Circuit Acceleration”; he uses three distinct assumptions for clarification:

1. The quantity of money in each circuit remains constant, interval by interval, over an indefinite series of intervals (CWL 15, 56 ff.)
2. G is zero; (D’-s’I’) and (D”-s”I”) are each equal and opposite, i.e. zero; and transfers to surplus supply (S”-s”O”) or to basic supply (S’-s’O’) or to both may be positive (CWL 15, 60 ff.)
3. What happens when the transfers to demand (D’-s’I’) and (D”-s”I”) are positive or negative or the crossover difference, G, is not zero? (CWL 15, 6e ff.)

… the longer (ultimate problems) last, the greater the intractability of ultimate problems.    [CWL 15, 5-6]

[CWL 15, 85-86] …  Once the possibility of an unbalanced budget is established, the precedent can be invoked to persuade politicians to carry on other wars: wars on illiteracy, on poverty, on ill health, on unemployment, on insecurity.  Where the profit motive does not prove efficacious, the state must intervene. … the increasing volume of transactions requires a larger money supply, and the central bank can be persuaded to meet the demand. … it appears to be less evident that a vicious circle  of ever more demands for a larger money supply with no increase in real income is inflationary … In any case there has emerged in fact if not in name the welfare state.

A 3-fold process:

So there is to be discerned a threefold process in which a basic stage is maintained and accelerated by a series of surplus stages, while the needed additions to or subtractions from the stock of money in these processes is derived from the redistributive area. … it will be possible to distinguish stable and unstable combinations and sequences of rates in the three main areas and so gain some insight into the long-standing recurrence of crises in the modern expanding economy. [CWL 15, 53-4 and 177]

On the other hand, the subsequent stock market break intensifies the crisis of the circuits, removing the props that had swollen expansive tendencies, and leaving the system with a greater height from which to fall. (CWL 15, 162)

So we are brought to the profound disillusionment of modern man and to the focal point of his horror.  … the fact of advance and the evidence of power are not guarantees of truth, that myth is the permanent alternative to mystery and mystery is what his hubris rejected.  The real issue, then, is truth.  (CWL 3, 549/572-73)

It follows that there as many instances of the Riemannian manifold and so many distinct geometries, as there are tensors of covariant tensors of the second degree employed to specify the coefficients, g_ij  .  Thus in the familiar Euclidean instance, g_ij is unity when i equals j; it is zero when i does not equal j; and there are three dimensions.  In Minkowski space, the g_ij is unity or zero as before, but there are four dimensions, and x₄ equals ict. In the General Theory of Relativity, the coefficients are symmetrical, so that g_ij equals g_ji; and in the Generalized Theory of Gravitation, the coefficients are anti-symmetrical.   [CWL 3, 146 -147/170-71]

Merely theoretical

Such relative invulnerability brings the circuits to a distorted quasi-equilibrium in which an artificial rate of pure surplus income is sustained by a rate of losses. … [CWL 15, 154-55]

Characteristics of money

… the divided exchange postulates a dummy that will bridge the intervals, short or long, between contribution to the process and sharing in its products.  Further, if this dummy is to work satisfactorily, if it is to bridge the intervals fairly and adequately, then it must fulfill certain conditions.  The first of these is Divisibility … The second condition is homogeneity … The third condition is that the dummy must be constant in exchange value … The fourth condition is that the dummy be universally acceptable within a given area, so that anyone willing to exchange will be willing to surrender property, goods, or services for the dummy.  Whether this fourth condition is distinct from the other three has been a matter of dispute.… [CWL 21, 37-39]

But YES YES I agree that the 17 year olds can get it in a couple of hours: I taught a class the key points in a school in Australia that way. (Private communication with P. McShane)

… (the) broad backing of centralism and bureaucracy are signaled, in the long run, for phlogiston flushing. [McShane 2014, 56]

Accordingly, the necessary and sufficient condition of constant value in the dummy lies in its concomitant variation with the real flow. (CWL 21, 38-39)

The principles of borrowing and lending have not changed.

A rigidly egalitarian system belongs to a perfectly egalitarian world; (but) a world in which men are, in fact, unequal must find a different system.  What system?  If the idealism is sentiment without intelligence, it is as likely as not to mate with the underground cynicism of the revolutionaries to foist upon us a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the proletariat does not dictate, a dictatorship of the Herrenvolk in which the Volk obeys the Fuhrer.  But if that idealism can be brought too learn the discipline of logic and of scientific reflection, then it will impose a generalization of the exchange economy.  To determine the nature of such a generalization is the aim of this inquiry; [CWL 21, 36]

From the viewpoint of intelligence, the satisfactions allotted to individuals are to be measured by the ingenuity and diligence of each in contributing to the satisfactions of all; from the same high viewpoint the desires of each are to be regarded quite coolly as the motive power that keeps the social system functioning. [CWL 3, “The Tension of Community” 214-16/239-42]

There are sets of phenomena, notably the favorable and unfavorable balances of foreign trade, deficit government spending, and the payment of public debts by taxation, that are analogous to the phenomena of the cycle.  It is proposed to deal with them under the general title of ‘superposed circuits.’  (CWL 15, 162-63)

In our general account of the monetary circulation, two circuits, a basic and a surplus, were distinguished.  They were interconnected with a crossover.  But they involved no regular flow through the Redistributive Function. … There is, however, no impossibility of the Redistributive Function becoming a point through which a circuit regularly passes …  On the other hand, such a circuit both presupposes and is distinct from the basic and surplus circuits already considered.  Hence the name of superposed circuits, and also the mode of treatment.  (CWL 15, 162-63)

No doubt the additions or subtractions (of the superposed circuits) modify these rates (in the fundamental operative circuits already considered, and) reinforce or counteract the tendencies of whatever phase may be in progress.  Our purpose in representing them as (superposed circuits) is not at all to deny such interaction but rather to gain a viewpoint from which such interaction may be studied.  The viewpoint adopted is that of the circuit. (CWL 15, 162-63)